Amphenol Earnings Call Insights: Info-Tech Market and Mobility Sector

Amphenol Corp (NYSE:APH) recently reported its fourth quarter earnings and discussed the following topics in its earnings conference call.

Info-Tech Market

Sherri Scribner – Deutsche Bank: I was hoping you could dig a little bit more into what’s going on in the info-tech market. I think you said that business was weak at the end of the quarter. Just wanted to get a sense of is that primarily on the server storage side, is that primarily on the telecom side, maybe you could provide a little more detail?

Richard Adam Norwitt – President and CEO: Look, the fourth quarter certainly on a year-over-year basis was strong and the strength in the fourth quarter was in particular driven by servers and there are a lot of new release servers where we have an expanded position on those servers with a lot of our new high-speed products as well as, especially power products where more and more the efficiency of power in those servers becomes a real selling factor for our customers. We had anticipated and we had heard from our customers going into the fourth quarter that the overall spending patterns from their customers appear to be moderating somewhat and I think we even talked about at the last conference call that that of all the markets appeared to be one where there was some macro, global economic impact to that market. I think as we go into the first quarter, we continue to see and hear from our customers that in general the outlook from the various IT managers around the world is not really anymore positive and has not turned more positive and that’s why we have given guidance going into the quarter that we would expect some degree of further moderation. But whether that is in servers or networking or transmission or storage, that’s not necessarily so clear to us sitting where we sit today; but the overall budgeting and the overall spending among the IT managers of the world appears to still be somewhat conservative. That all being said, we have done a great job this year in ensuring our position across the board, because as you may know, the IT industry has one other characteristic that is relatively new this year, and in the prior couple of years, which is the level of competition among the equipment makers has truly ratcheted up, whether that is from new entrants or people who are traditionally involved in one segment now getting into other segment, there is just a real tremendous dogfight going on in the IT industry. We don’t bet on which of those dogs is going to win the fight. We have worked very hard to ensure a strong position across the board, among all of the major manufacturers of IT hardware and datacenter hardware. In my mind, the demand for data, driven by video, driven by these mobile devices, that continues to create a tremendous level of end demand eventually, that will eventually demand some of this equipment to be produced and we have very, very strong positions across the board there.

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